The levels of corruption in Russia are crazy high and easily visible to everyone - nobody I know who has been there would claim otherwise, and various stats confirm that.

If you’re of a different opinion, I’d love to see any sort of proof. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that :)

This is a good starting point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Russia

It’s like conparing a person that has thrown a piece of trash on a ground and a person that dumped a garbage bin and saying they are the same.

Who cares? Do you honestly think things are much different in the US or Europe? It's just more corporate corruption that doesn't leak through society where you suddenly find yourself having to openly bribe a cop for a traffic violation. It's also not like anyone really cares about corruption or Germany would've long been penalized for not having implemented a EU ratified anti corruption law.

If anyone in the West actually cared about corruption we wouldn't be sending billions in cash and military equipment to Ukraine.

Yes, they are much different in Europe. We have a direct comparison in Poland - over the last 20-30 years the levels of corruption almost equalised with western countries and it’s like night and day.

And I’m speaking both about corporate and government corruption.

Have you been to Russia? Do you know people that live there? Did you speak to them about corruption? (asking about anecdotes, because stats don’t appeal to you I understand)

In the US we just legalized corruption. Does that mean there’s less of it?

When's the last time you were forced to pay a bribe? How often have doctors, cops, city officials, ladies at the DMV and other people in power explained how they cannot help you despite a completely valid request, and at the same time, made a suggestion that there might be other ways to solve your problem?

I would happily trade legalized congressional corruption for petty bribery at traffic stops. The former affects everyone’s lives in profoundly anti-democratic ways. To take one simple example, Americans broadly support universal healthcare, but various corporate lobbying groups spend huge sums to keep it at bay. To me that is far more corrupt than paying cops and lazy DMV employees.

What you call "petty bribery" are vast networks where people at every level squeeze citizens for bribes, take their cut, and pass the rest upwards to their superiors. People who run the country are the bosses of various bribery chains whose influence depends on the depth and width of the corruption network. They are like competing mafia families: military mafia gets money by skimming contracts and squeezing people for bribes to get their children out of forced conscription; legal mafia gets money by selling verdicts; etc.

It's funny that you mention corporate lobbying. In a truly corrupt place, companies are treated no better than citizens. Companies are squeezed for bribes too, and if they resist, then companies get raided and taken over. Owners get imprisoned on made up charges (or, ironically, for past bribing that they are unwilling to continue) and new owners are installed, usually members of the same corruption network, such as children of officials. In places like Russia, the equivalents of governors and congressmen are all owners of factories, oil terminals, ports, banks and other major businesses. They just steal the companies. It is impossible to run a successful major company without being one way or another a piggy bank for the corruption networks, permanently at risk of losing it all in illegal takeovers. (I recommend Bill Browder's books if you'd like to know more.)

The western world has so little corruption that an average citizen or company never experiences anything like this.

The US doesn't have a "dear leader" who imprisons political opponents on spurious grounds in order to win elections. So there's that.

I don't know, there aren't many countries that imprison more people per capita than the US, including historical countries. There are also lots of political prisoners, secret courts and that kind of stuff.

In terms of winning elections, it maybe is better to simply only have two parties that are propped up by oligarchs' money and offer pretty similar politics but different coloured flags. That way you don't have to imprison any opponents to start with....

This is all true, and still far better than the situation in Russia.

It'd be remiss to pass that by without noting there were something like 100 frivolous court cases launched against Trump around the time his poll numbers visibly overtook Biden's in an ongoing attempting to get him knocked out of the race. There is still hope that they weren't coordinated through the White House, but the gap to somewhere like Russia isn't as comfortably wide any more on that front.

Not too remiss. Probably the most remiss aspect is a lack of citations and use of loaded terms like "frivolous". Even granting your interpretation, the gap between this and the persecution, imprisonment and effective assassination of Navalny is extremely wide indeed.

But without government, it would be anarchy!

Sign me up!

I don’t think people appreciated this one, but it made me chuckle thanks.

Lobbyism is legal corruption in my book. See what AIPAC has paid senators (over 10 million for Biden over his whole carreer), and that the US gives money to Israel (whom in turn pays AIPC for it's work). That means that, in a way, americans pay to corrupt their own politicians... legally!

Yes this is what I was getting at. I thought this was a common enough sentiment that I didn’t need to spell it out, but no one seems to have understood what I mean.

And sure, your example is politically charged right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Another example is universal healthcare. This is popular amongst the general population but powerful lobbies keep it at bay. This has extreme life and death consequences for Americans! It’s legal corruption with serious consequences.

It's a total subversion of democracy.

Remember the "russian interferrence" scandal that supposedly happened? MSM was all over it, the only thing you heard.

10 million to Biden got from AIPAC is never even mentioned in the MSM.

It's beyond repair I'm afraid.

Yep. Actually I hadn’t even thought of pro-Israel donations to Biden until you mentioned it, but you’re right we heard all about Russian interference.

OpenSecrets lists the figure as $4.2m since 1990, but that is still the highest amount for anyone listed and clearly a great deal of funds. (And I suspect there are multiple ways to classify money as “pro-Israel”)

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind...

And yeah, you’re getting downvoted but what you’re saying is nominally accurate, just uncomfortable for people to face, and we’ve quite effectively been trained to dismiss those thoughts.

I don’t think anything politically is ever beyond repair, and I’m in favor of change, but it’s going to take a lot of work and it’s going to require broad-based grassroots efforts to get anywhere.